Cloud computing is quickly becoming the platform of choice for businesses that want to reduce operating expenses and be able to scale resources rapidly. Eased automation, flexibility, mobility, resiliency, and redundancy are several other advantages of moving resources to the cloud. On-premise private clouds allow businesses to take advantage of cloud technologies while remaining on a private network. Public clouds allow businesses to make use of resources provided by third party vendors. Hybrid clouds allow the best of both public and private cloud computing models. Many organizations are being introduced to cloud computing by building an on-premise Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud, which delivers computing, storage, and networking resources to users. Some organizations utilize cloud computing technology in an evolutionary way that leverages and extends their existing infrastructure and maintains portability across different technology stacks and providers.
Virtual machine instances in cloud computing are, for the most part, ephemeral. The state of a virtual machine is not persistent and is lost at shut down. A set of virtual machines can be launched with a particular configuration in a cloud one day and can be launched in a different cloud provider environment the next day. Enterprise application designers typically need to configure the interactions of a particular system with external resources, such as storage, network systems with particular properties, public services which are accessible in well-known ways, or other machines in close (or even distant) proximity to the system being configured. Traditional solutions require application developers to manually define and set up configuration files of various sorts. At deployment, an extensive amount of time and work is dedicated to setting up the configuration on each individual machine, in order to get the machine to communicate with other systems, resources, etc. Conventional efforts at automating installation of virtual machines using the mechanisms provided by the operating system vendor often fail because too much customization is attempted at the time of installation. Such traditional solutions are prone to error and do not provide a debug environment to identify the cause of the error.